Biblio

Communications play a fundamental role in the economic and social well-being of the citizens and on operations of most of the critical infrastructures (CIs). Extreme weather events, natural disasters and criminal attacks represent a challenge due to their increase in frequency and intensity requiring smarter resilience of the Communication CIs, which are extremely vulnerable due to the ever-increasing complexity of the architecture also in light of the evolution towards 5G, the extensive use of programmable platforms and exponential growth of connected devices. In this paper, we present the aim of RESISTO H2020 EU-funded project, which constitutes an innovative solution for Communication CIs holistic situation awareness and enhanced resilience.

The new generation ship integrated power system (IPS) realizes high level informatization for various physical equipments, and gradually develops to a cyber-physical system (CPS). The future trend is collecting ship big data to achieve data-driven intelligence for IPS. However, traditional relational data management framework becomes inefficient to handle the real-time data processing in ship integrated power cyber-physics system. In order to process the large-scale real-time data that collected from numerous sensors by field bus of IPS devices within acceptable latency, especially for handling the semi-structured and non-structured data. This paper proposes a novel key-value data model based real-time data management framework, which enables batch processing and distributed deployment to acquire time-efficiency as well as system scalable. We implement a real-time data management prototype system based on an open source in-memory key-value store. Finally, the evaluation results from the prototype verify the advantages of novel framework compared with traditional solution.

Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is an experimental transport protocol designed to primarily reduce connection establishment and transport latency, as well as to improve security standards with default end-to-end encryption in HTTPbased applications. QUIC is a multiplexed and secure transport protocol fostered by Google and its design emerged from the urgent need of innovation in the transport layer, mainly due to difficulties extending TCP and deploying new protocols. While still under standardisation, a non-negligble fraction of the Internet's traffic, more than 7% of a European Tier1-ISP, is already running over QUIC and it constitutes more than 30% of Google's egress traffic [1].

The normal operation of key measurement and control equipment in power grid (KMCEPG) is of great significance for safe and stable operation of power grid. Firstly, this paper gives a systematic overview of KMCEPG. Secondly, the cyber security risks of KMCEPG on the main station / sub-station side, channel side and terminal side are analyzed and the related vulnerabilities are discovered. Thirdly, according to the risk analysis results, the attack process construction technology of KMCEPG is proposed, which provides the test process and attack ideas for the subsequent KMCEPG-related attack penetration. Fourthly, the simulation penetration test environment is built, and a series of attack tests are carried out on the terminal key control equipment by using the attack flow construction technology proposed in this paper. The correctness of the risk analysis and the effectiveness of the attack process construction technology are verified. Finally, the attack test results are analyzed, and the attack test cases of terminal critical control devices are constructed, which provide the basis for the subsequent attack test. The attack flow construction technology and attack test cases proposed in this paper improve the network security defense capability of key equipment of power grid, ensure the safe and stable operation of power grid, and have strong engineering application value.

IoT trust management is a security solution that assures the trust between different IoT entities before establishing any relationship with other anonymous devices. Recent researches presented in the literature tend to use a Blockchain-based trust management model for IoT besides the fog node approach in order to address the constraints of IoT resources. Actually, Blockchain has solved many drawbacks of centralized models. However, it is still not preferable for dealing with massive data produced by IoT because of its drawbacks such as delay, network overhead, and scalability issues. Therefore, in this paper we define some factors that should be considered when designing scalable models, and we propose a fully distributed trust management model for IoT that provide a large-scale trust model and address the limitations of Blockchain. We design our model based on a new approach called Holochain considering some security issues, such as detecting misbehaviors, data integrity and availability.

With the exponential growth in the usage of electronic medical records (EMR), the amount of data generated by the healthcare industry has too increased exponentially. These large amounts of data, known as “Big Data” is mostly unstructured. Special big data analytics methods are required to process the information and retrieve information which is meaningful. As patient information in hospitals and other healthcare facilities become increasingly electronic, Big Data technologies are needed now more than ever to manage and understand this data. In addition, this information tends to be quite sensitive and needs a highly secure environment. However, current security algorithms are hard to be implemented because it would take a huge amount of time and resources. Security protocols in Big data are also not adequate in protecting sensitive information in the healthcare. As a result, the healthcare data is both heterogeneous and insecure. As a solution we propose the Secure Pattern-Based Data Sensitivity Framework (PBDSF), that uses machine learning mechanisms to identify the common set of attributes of patient data, data frequency, various patterns of codes used to identify specific conditions to secure sensitive information. The framework uses Hadoop and is built on Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) as a basis for our clusters of machines to process Big Data, and perform tasks such as identifying sensitive information in a huge amount of data and encrypting data that are identified to be sensitive.

Nowadays interest in IoT solutions is growing. A significant barrier to the use of these solutions in military applications is to ensure the security of data transmission and authentication of data sources and recipients of the data. Developing an efficient solution to these problems requires finding a compromise between the facts that the sensors often are mobile, use wireless communication, usually have the small processing power and have little energy resources. The article presents the security domain designated for cooperating mobile sensor nodes. The domain has the following features: the strong authentication of each domain member, cryptographic protection of data exchange in the data link layer and protection of data stored in the sensor node resources. The domain is also prepared to perform diagnostic procedures and to exchange sensory data with other domains securely. At each node, the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is used to support these procedures.

Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try to guess the destination and attempt to execute ahead. When the memory value finally arrives, the CPU either discards or commits the speculative computation. Speculative logic is unfaithful in how it executes, can access the victim's memory and registers, and can perform operations with measurable side effects. Spectre attacks involve inducing a victim to speculatively perform operations that would not occur during correct program execution and which leak the victim's confidential information via a side channel to the adversary. This paper describes practical attacks that combine methodology from side channel attacks, fault attacks, and return-oriented programming that can read arbitrary memory from the victim's process. More broadly, the paper shows that speculative execution implementations violate the security assumptions underpinning numerous software security mechanisms, including operating system process separation, containerization, just-in-time (JIT) compilation, and countermeasures to cache timing and side-channel attacks. These attacks represent a serious threat to actual systems since vulnerable speculative execution capabilities are found in microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and ARM that are used in billions of devices. While makeshift processor-specific countermeasures are possible in some cases, sound solutions will require fixes to processor designs as well as updates to instruction set architectures (ISAs) to give hardware architects and software developers a common understanding as to what computation state CPU implementations are (and are not) permitted to leak.

The explosive growth of mobile traffic in the Internet makes content delivery a challenging issue to cope with. To promote efficiency of content distribution and reduce network cost, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and content providers (CPs) are motivated to cooperatively work. As a clean-slate solution, nowadays Information-Centric Networking architectures have been proposed and widely researched, where the thought of in-network caching, especially edge caching, can be applied to mobile wireless networks to fundamentally address this problem. Considered the profit split issue between ISPs and CPs and the influence of content popularity is largely ignored, in this paper, we propose a Stackelberg-based optimal network profit split scheme for content delivery in information-centric wireless networks. Simulation results show that the performance of our proposed model is comparable to its centralized solution and obviously superior to current ISP-CP cooperative schemes without considering cache deployment in the network.

Static security assessment is of great significance to ensure the stable transmission of electric power and steady operation of load. The scale of power system trends to expand due to the development of interconnected grid, and the security analysis of the entire network has become time-consuming. On the basis of synthesizing the efficiency and accuracy, a new method is developed. This method adopts a novel dynamic power flow (DPF) model considering the influence of governor deadband and amplitude-limit on the steady state quantitatively. In order to reduce the computation cost, a contingency screening algorithm based on binary search method is proposed. Static security assessment based on the proposed DPF models is applied to calculate the security margin constrained by severe contingencies. The ones with lower margin are chosen for further time-domain (TD) simulation analysis. The case study of a practical grid verifies the accuracy of the proposed model compared with the conventional one considering no governor nonlinearity. Moreover, the test of a practical grid in China, along with the TD simulation, demonstrates that the proposed method avoids massive simulations of all contingencies as well as provides detail information of severe ones, which is effective for security analysis of practical power grids.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an implementation of cloud computing that leverages virtualization technology to provide on-demand network functions such as firewalls, domain name servers, etc., as software services. One of the methods that help us understand the design and implementation process of such a new system in an abstract way is architectural modeling. Architectural modeling can be presented through UML diagrams to show the interaction between different components and its stakeholders. Also, it can be used to analyze the security threats and the possible countermeasures to mitigate the threats. In this paper, we show some of the possible threats that may jeopardize the security of NFV. We use misuse patterns to analyze misuses based on privilege escalation and VM escape threats. The misuse patterns are part of an ongoing catalog, which is the first step toward building a security reference architecture for NFV.

Machine-learning solutions are successfully adopted in multiple contexts but the application of these techniques to the cyber security domain is complex and still immature. Among the many open issues that affect security systems based on machine learning, we concentrate on adversarial attacks that aim to affect the detection and prediction capabilities of machine-learning models. We consider realistic types of poisoning and evasion attacks targeting security solutions devoted to malware, spam and network intrusion detection. We explore the possible damages that an attacker can cause to a cyber detector and present some existing and original defensive techniques in the context of intrusion detection systems. This paper contains several performance evaluations that are based on extensive experiments using large traffic datasets. The results highlight that modern adversarial attacks are highly effective against machine-learning classifiers for cyber detection, and that existing solutions require improvements in several directions. The paper paves the way for more robust machine-learning-based techniques that can be integrated into cyber security platforms.

The Dark Web, a conglomerate of services hidden from search engines and regular users, is used by cyber criminals to offer all kinds of illegal services and goods. Multiple Dark Web offerings are highly relevant for the cyber security domain in anticipating and preventing attacks, such as information about zero-day exploits, stolen datasets with login information, or botnets available for hire. In this work, we analyze and discuss the challenges related to information gathering in the Dark Web for cyber security intelligence purposes. To facilitate information collection and the analysis of large amounts of unstructured data, we present BlackWidow, a highly automated modular system that monitors Dark Web services and fuses the collected data in a single analytics framework. BlackWidow relies on a Docker-based micro service architecture which permits the combination of both preexisting and customized machine learning tools. BlackWidow represents all extracted data and the corresponding relationships extracted from posts in a large knowledge graph, which is made available to its security analyst users for search and interactive visual exploration. Using BlackWidow, we conduct a study of seven popular services on the Deep and Dark Web across three different languages with almost 100,000 users. Within less than two days of monitoring time, BlackWidow managed to collect years of relevant information in the areas of cyber security and fraud monitoring. We show that BlackWidow can infer relationships between authors and forums and detect trends for cybersecurity-related topics. Finally, we discuss exemplary case studies surrounding leaked data and preparation for malicious activity.

In this paper, the cybersecurity of distributed secondary voltage control of AC microgrids is addressed. A resilient approach is proposed to mitigate the negative impacts of cyberthreats on the voltage and reactive power control of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). The proposed secondary voltage control is inspired by the resilient flocking of a mobile robot team. This approach utilizes a virtual time-varying communication graph in which the quality of the communication links is virtualized and determined based on the synchronization behavior of DERs. The utilized control protocols on DERs ensure that the connectivity of the virtual communication graph is above a specific resilience threshold. Once the resilience threshold is satisfied the Weighted Mean Subsequence Reduced (WMSR) algorithm is applied to satisfy voltage restoration in the presence of malicious adversaries. A typical microgrid test system including 6 DERs is simulated to verify the validity of proposed resilient control approach.

The rapid growth of Android malware has posed severe security threats to smartphone users. On the basis of the familial trait of Android malware observed by previous work, the familial analysis is a promising way to help analysts better focus on the commonalities of malware samples within the same families, thus reducing the analytical workload and accelerating malware analysis. The majority of existing approaches rely on supervised learning and face three main challenges, i.e., low accuracy, low efficiency, and the lack of labeled dataset. To address these challenges, we first construct a fine-grained behavior model by abstracting the program semantics into a set of subgraphs. Then, we propose SRA, a novel feature that depicts the similarity relationships between the Structural Roles of sensitive API call nodes in subgraphs. An SRA is obtained based on graph embedding techniques and represented as a vector, thus we can effectively reduce the high complexity of graph matching. After that, instead of training a classifier with labeled samples, we construct malware link network based on SRAs and apply community detection algorithms on it to group the unlabeled samples into groups. We implement these ideas in a system called GefDroid that performs Graph embedding based familial analysis of AnDroid malware using unsupervised learning. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate GefDroid on three datasets with ground truth. The results show that GefDroid can achieve high agreements (0.707-0.883 in term of NMI) between the clustering results and the ground truth. Furthermore, GefDroid requires only linear run-time overhead and takes around 8.6s to analyze a sample on average, which is considerably faster than the previous work.

In recent years, Network-on-Chip (NoC) has gained increasing popularity as a promising solution for the challenging interconnection problem in multi-processor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). However, the interest of adversaries to compromise such systems grew accordingly, mandating the integration of security measures into NoC designs. Within this paper, we introduce three novel lightweight approaches for securing communication in NoCs. The suggested solutions combine encryption, authentication, and network coding in order to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and robustness. With performance being critical in NoC environments, our solutions particularly emphasize low latencies and low chip area. Our approaches were evaluated through extensive software simulations. The results have shown that the performance degradation induced by the protection measures is clearly outweighed by the aforementioned benefits. Furthermore, the area overhead implied by the additional components is reasonably low.

An emerging Internet business is residential proxy (RESIP) as a service, in which a provider utilizes the hosts within residential networks (in contrast to those running in a datacenter) to relay their customers' traffic, in an attempt to avoid server- side blocking and detection. With the prominent roles the services could play in the underground business world, little has been done to understand whether they are indeed involved in Cybercrimes and how they operate, due to the challenges in identifying their RESIPs, not to mention any in-depth analysis on them. In this paper, we report the first study on RESIPs, which sheds light on the behaviors and the ecosystem of these elusive gray services. Our research employed an infiltration framework, including our clients for RESIP services and the servers they visited, to detect 6 million RESIP IPs across 230+ countries and 52K+ ISPs. The observed addresses were analyzed and the hosts behind them were further fingerprinted using a new profiling system. Our effort led to several surprising findings about the RESIP services unknown before. Surprisingly, despite the providers' claim that the proxy hosts are willingly joined, many proxies run on likely compromised hosts including IoT devices. Through cross-matching the hosts we discovered and labeled PUP (potentially unwanted programs) logs provided by a leading IT company, we uncovered various illicit operations RESIP hosts performed, including illegal promotion, Fast fluxing, phishing, malware hosting, and others. We also reverse engi- neered RESIP services' internal infrastructures, uncovered their potential rebranding and reselling behaviors. Our research takes the first step toward understanding this new Internet service, contributing to the effective control of their security risks.

Manufacturers often buy and/or license communication ICs from third-party suppliers. These communication ICs are then integrated into a complex computational system, resulting in a wide range of potential hardware-software security issues. This work proposes a compact supervisory circuit to classify the Bluetooth profile operation of a Bluetooth System-on-Chip (SoC) at low frequencies by monitoring the radio frequency (RF) output power of the Bluetooth SoC. The idea is to inexpensively manufacture an RF envelope detector to monitor the RF output power and a profile classification algorithm on a custom low-frequency integrated circuit in a low-cost legacy technology. When the supervisory circuit observes unexpected behavior, it can shut off power to the Bluetooth SoC. In this preliminary work, we proto-type the supervisory circuit using off-the-shelf components to collect a sufficient data set to train 11 different Machine Learning models. We extract smart descriptive time-domain features from the envelope of the RF output signal. Then, we train the machine learning models to classify three different Bluetooth operation profiles: sensor, hands-free, and headset. Our results demonstrate 100% classification accuracy with low computational complexity.

In the process of diagnosing the culture of information security in an organization, it is considered two methods, the first one is the application of an ISCA (Information Security Culture Assessment) survey questionnaire and the second one based on social engineering techniques such as phishing, answering the question, How can a diagnosis be made effectively of the level of information security culture within an organization? with the objective of determining which of the two methods is the most effective and realistic for the diagnosis of the information security culture. This helps to understand and have a real and complete perception of the behavior and reaction of the users against the attacks of threat actors who make use of persuasion and manipulation tactics in order to obtain confidential or sensitive information. A description of these two methods is applied to a case study (public university). As a result, it is obtained that it is not enough to perform a diagnosis based on questionnaires because they can be relatively subjective in the sense of the way in which users respond to questions or statements. Evidence of controlled social engineering attacks that demonstrate in more detail the real behavior of users should be considered. Based on this more complete knowledge, appropriate strategies can be formulated for the change or strengthening of the security culture that ultimately contributes to the purpose of protecting information assets.

Complex military systems are typically cyber-physical systems which are the targets of high level threat actors, and must be able to operate within a highly contested cyber environment. There is an emerging need to provide a strong level of assurance against these threat actors, but the process by which this assurance can be tested and evaluated is not so clear. This paper outlines an initial framework developed through research for evaluating the cyber-worthiness of complex mission critical systems using threat models developed in SysML. The framework provides a visual model of the process by which a threat actor could attack the system. It builds on existing concepts from system safety engineering and expands on how to present the risks and mitigations in an understandable manner.

The Smart Grid is the leading example when talking about complex and critical System-of-Systems (SoS). Specifically regarding the Smart Grids criticality, dependability is a central quality attribute to strive for. Combined with the desire of agility in modern development, conventional systems engineering methods reach their limits in coping with these requirements. However, approaches from model-based or model-driven engineering can reduce complexity and encourage development with rapidly changing requirements. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is known to be more successful in a domain specific manner. For that reason, an approach for Domain Specific Systems Engineering (DSSE) in the Smart Grid has already been specially investigated. This Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) approach especially aims the comprehensibility of complex systems. In this context, the traceability of requirements is a centrally pursued attribute. However, achieving continuing traceability between the model of a system and the concrete implementation is still an open issue. To close this gap, the present research paper introduces a Model-Centric Software Development (MCSD) solution for Smart Grid applications. Based on two exploratory case studies, the focus finally lies on the automated generation of partial implementation artifacts and the evaluation of traceability, based on dedicated functional aspects.

The search for alternative delivery modes to teaching has been one of the pressing concerns of numerous educational institutions. One key innovation to improve teaching and learning is e-learning which has undergone enormous improvements. From its focus on text-based environment, it has evolved into Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) which provide more stimulating and immersive experiences among learners and educators. An example of VLEs is the virtual world which is an emerging educational platform among universities worldwide. One very interesting topic that can be taught using the virtual world is cybersecurity. Simulating cybersecurity in the virtual world may give a realistic experience to students which can be hardly achieved by classroom teaching. To date, there are quite a number of studies focused on cybersecurity awareness and cybersecurity behavior. But none has focused looking into the effect of digital simulation in the virtual world, as a new educational platform, in the cybersecurity attitude of the students. It is in this regard that this study has been conducted by designing simulation in the virtual world lessons that teaches the five aspects of cybersecurity namely; malware, phishing, social engineering, password usage and online scam, which are the most common cybersecurity issues. The study sought to examine the effect of this digital simulation design in the cybersecurity knowledge and attitude of the students. The result of the study ascertains that students exposed under simulation in the virtual world have a greater positive change in cybersecurity knowledge and attitude than their counterparts.

Security concerns for field-programmable gate array (FPGA) applications and hardware are evolving as FPGA designs grow in complexity, involve sophisticated intellectual properties (IPs), and pass through more entities in the design and implementation flow. FPGAs are now routinely found integrated into system-on-chip (SoC) platforms, cloud-based shared computing resources, and in commercial and government systems. The IPs included in FPGAs are sourced from multiple origins and passed through numerous entities (such as design house, system integrator, and users) through the lifecycle. This paper thoroughly examines the interaction of these entities from the perspective of the bitstream file responsible for the actual hardware configuration of the FPGA. Five stages of the bitstream lifecycle are introduced to analyze this interaction: 1) bitstream-generation, 2) bitstream-at-rest, 3) bitstream-loading, 4) bitstream-running, and 5) bitstream-end-of-life. Potential threats and vulnerabilities are discussed at each stage, and both vendor-offered and academic countermeasures are highlighted for a robust and comprehensive security assurance.

Guaranteeing a certain level of user privacy in an arbitrary piece of text is a challenging issue. However, with this challenge comes the potential of unlocking access to vast data stores for training machine learning models and supporting data driven decisions. We address this problem through the lens of dx-privacy, a generalization of Differential Privacy to non Hamming distance metrics. In this work, we explore word representations in Hyperbolic space as a means of preserving privacy in text. We provide a proof satisfying dx-privacy, then we define a probability distribution in Hyperbolic space and describe a way to sample from it in high dimensions. Privacy is provided by perturbing vector representations of words in high dimensional Hyperbolic space to obtain a semantic generalization. We conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate the tradeoff between privacy and utility. Our privacy experiments illustrate protections against an authorship attribution algorithm while our utility experiments highlight the minimal impact of our perturbations on several downstream machine learning models. Compared to the Euclidean baseline, we observe \textbackslashtextgreater 20x greater guarantees on expected privacy against comparable worst case statistics.

Aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional network active security threat model that cannot continuously control the threat process, a network active security threat model based on offensive and defensive differential game is constructed. The attack and defense differential game theory is used to define the parameters of the network active security threat model, on this basis, the network security target is determined, the network active security threat is identified by the attack defense differential equation, and finally the network active security threat is quantitatively evaluated, thus construction of network active security threat model based on offensive and defensive differential game is completed. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional network active security threat model, the proposed model is more feasible in the attack and defense control of the network active security threat process, and can achieve the ideal application effect.